Lisa Hymas - Climate change is the story you missed in 2017. And the media is to blame
Which story did you
hear more about this year – how climate change makes disasters like hurricanes
worse, or how Donald Trump threw paper towels at Puerto
Ricans? If you answered the latter, you have plenty of company. Academic
Jennifer Good analyzed two
weeks of hurricane coverage during the height of hurricane season on eight
major TV networks, and found that about 60% of the stories included the word
Trump, and only about 5% mentioned climate change.
Trump doesn’t just
suck the oxygen out of the room; he sucks the carbon dioxide out of the
national dialogue. Even in a year when we’ve had string of hurricanes,
heatwaves, and wildfires worthy of the Book of Revelation – just what climate
scientists have told us to expect –
the effect of climate change on extreme weather has been dramatically
undercovered. Some of Trump’s tweets generate more
national
coverage than devastating disasters.
Good’s analysis lines
up with research done by my organization, Media Matters for America, which found
that TV news outlets gave far too little coverage to the well-documented links between
climate change and hurricanes. ABC and NBC both completely failed to
bring up climate change during their news coverage of Harvey, a storm that
caused the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the continental US. When Irma hit
soon after, breaking the record for hurricane intensity, ABC didn’t
do much better.
Coverage was even
worse of Hurricane Maria, the third hurricane to make landfall in the US this
year. Not only did media outlets largely fail to cover the climate connection;
in many cases, they largely failed to cover the hurricane itself. The weekend
after Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, the five major Sunday political talkshows
devoted less
than one minute in total to the storm and the humanitarian emergency
it triggered. And Maria got only about a third as many mentions in major print
and online media outlets as did Harvey and Irma, researchers at the MIT Media Lab found.